n her mind the glimpses she
had had of the wonderful lands from which they had come, to imagine
their lives in that earlier environment. Sometimes she wandered, alone
or with Eda, through the various quarters of the city. Each quarter had
a flavour of its own, a synthetic flavour belonging neither to the old
nor to the new, yet partaking of both: a difference in atmosphere to
which Janet was keenly sensitive. In the German quarter, to the north,
one felt a sort of ornamental bleakness--if the expression may be
permitted: the tenements here were clean and not too crowded, the
scroll-work on their superimposed porches, like that decorating the
Turnverein and the stem Lutheran Church, was eloquent of a Teutonic
inheritance: The Belgians were to the west, beyond the base-ball park
and the car barns, their grey houses scattered among new streets beside
the scarred and frowning face of Torrey's hill. Almost under the hill
itself, which threatened to roll down on it, and facing a bottomless,
muddy street, was the quaint little building giving the note of foreign
thrift, of socialism and shrewdness, of joie de vivre to the settlement,
the Franco-Belgian co-operative store, with its salle de reunion above
and a stage for amateur theatricals. Standing in the mud outside, Janet
would gaze through the tiny windows in the stucco wall at the baskets
prepared for each household laid in neat rows beside the counter; at
the old man with the watery blue eyes and lacing of red in his withered
cheeks who spoke no English, whose duty it was to distribute the baskets
to the women and children as they called.

Turning eastward again, one came to Dey Street, in the heart of Hampton,
where Hibernian Hall stood alone and grim, sole testimony of the
departed Hibernian glories of a district where the present Irish rulers
of the city had once lived and gossiped and fought in the days when the
mill bells had roused the boarding-house keepers at half past four of a
winter morning. Beside the hall was a corner lot, heaped high with hills
of ashes and rubbish like the vomitings of some filthy volcano; the
unsightliness of which was half concealed by huge signs announcing the
merits of chewing gums, tobaccos, and cereals. But why had the departure
of the Irish, the coming of the Syrians made Dey Street dark, narrow,
mysterious, oriental? changed the very aspect of its architecture? Was
it the coffee-houses? One of these, in front of which Janet liked
to